This past weekend was another busy one in the VorpBrew brew house. Biggest thing that was accomplished was blending some new batches and bottling others.
First up was the Chocolate Pumpkin Ale that I let get wild and funky with some Brett Lambicus yeast. This one was brewed almost exactly a year ago. I let it sit on the Lambicus yeast after noticing that my equipment might have been infected with a previous sour batch. Instead of pitching I decided to just let it go with this yeast and see what happened. I wasn't going to put another clean beer in the fermentor anymore so I had the space!
After a year of getting funky I am surprised to say it wasn't all that funky. It drank like a somewhat tart and sour pumpkin beer with notes of cinnamon spice and chocolate in the background.
We start all mixing sessions by taking the base beer and tasting it straight up. From there we determine where to go based on what other beers we have to blend. In this case we had the ability to add more spices or add some sour stout to give the beer a bit more tang.
We were really struggling what to do with this beer after tasting it. It was surprisingly subtle and multilayered in flavor but it was just missing something. So we just started to add some other ingredients to the base sour beer.
We added a sprinkle of pumpkin pie mix to the soured beer and really liked how it brought out the spices just a bite more. So that was determined as a good direction.
We then added some sour stout. First ratio was 12:1. That one part sour really added a more rounded flavor than anything. It didn't necessarily make the beer more sour but it made the sourness that was already there... fuller. The one thing this ratio did was completely mask the chocolate and you really had to hunt for the chocolate. So the next step was to reduce the ratio to 24:1 to try and bring back the chocolate flavor.
The 24:1 ratio brought back the chocolate and it somehow made the beer more sour. Less sour stout and it makes it tastes more sour! Didn't understand this at all. My buddy was blind to most of the mixing so I would tend to wait for his response before giving mine and it was confirmed that somehow this beer was more sour. Weird. Anyways, back to the tasting. This version had a bit more pumpkin but not much more that the 12:1 ratio.
We decided that the 12:1 ratio was the way to go because we really liked how it just made a more round flavor in the sourness and it still had a bit of the pumpkin flavor. We opted for the spice to add that traditional pumpkin pie flavor rather than a beer that was a bit one dimensional.
I mixed this up and its now sitting in a carboy marrying together. I plan to keg most of this batch to try out kegging a sour so it will be ready relatively quickly. I plan to bottle some others for next year and see how they age over time.
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